Things That Happened by Boris s> Slutsky G. S. Smith (review)

Abstract

148 SEER, 79, I, 2001 character in 7hreeSisters(p. 36) and anybody who did not know TheCherry Orchard could be forgiven for believing that the play concerns Ranevskaia's relations with her husband, her son and her lover, there being 'very little action in the traditional sense [... .] Ranevskaia'shusband dies of drink, her son drowns [and] her lover robs her' (p. 43). Pishchikis describedas having a 'tendency of putting himself to sleep' (p. 42) whilst the charactersare seen to be 'trappedin a kind of limbo that is not only spiritual,but often material,and even economic' (p. 35, emphases added). The author also quotes, uncritically, (in addition to supplying the wrong page reference)J. L. Styan's claim that there are no less than fifty off-stage characters in the play, including 'gardeners'.To cap it all, 7The Cherry Orchard is described as 'an example of a new genre, one that points to the absurdity of twentieth-century theatre' (p. 47) when presumablywhat is meant is Theatre of theAbsurd. In case this should seem unfair to Ms Kot, her impressive list of 'Works Cited' runsto twentypages (infact the endnotes, bibliographyand index take up fortypages nearly one third the length of the actual text) and she does give the impression of being very knowledgeable about Polish dramatists.In fact, one wonders why she did not base her study on the unknown and littleknown [to thisreviewer]names thatshecites.At itsbest, the bookis intelligent and informed;at itsworst it is both intellectuallyimmodest and expressively/ theoreticallybizarre.Bewailingthe styleof Tantalus and apparentlyforgetting that what is being describedis a play, Kot complains that, 'likethe flickering of an impressionist'spaintbrush, Ivanov [sic] dots the text with these tiny motifs [i.e. words] [...] that from a distance help create a subtle whole. However, when the recipientconfrontsthem up close, the image disintegrates and each recipient loses himself in the little blobs of roots that dance before his eyes on the page' (p. 12I). All in all, the book has about it an air of imaginativelyingenuous and dubiously-theorizedprovisionality. Department ofHumanities andCultural Studies NICK WORRALL Middlesex University Slutsky,Boris. 7hingsthatHappened. Edited,translatedandwithanIntroduction and Commentaries by G. S. Smith. Glas New Russian Writing, i9. Birmingham University,Birmingham,I999. Vi+314pp. Illustrations. Index. [ I.99. THE contribution to Slavonicstudiesof GerrySmithis remarkable, amongst otherthings,forhisunerring senseofwhatisnecessary, ratherthanwhatmay be commercially attractive, likeyet anotherbookon one of thenineteenthcenturyclassics .Hispioneering workon PrinceMirskii andon Russianverse andversification arewellknown,butthepresentvolumein somewaysmarks a newdeparture, beinginparta translated anthology, inparta biography of Boris Slutskii(I9I9-86), a poet who, like many other Soviet writers, was in dangerof post-perestroika oblivion.Smithhasperformed a valuableservice in rescuingSlutskii's reputation fromthe fateof a vaguelyremembered and largely misunderstood Sovietwarpoet.Bypublishing manyofSlutskii's poems andmemoirswhichhaveonlycometolightin thepost-Communist era,and by usingthe poet'sarchiveto providea narrativecommentary, Smithhas REVIEWS 149 produced a fascinatingbook that rehabilitatesthis interestingand individual writerfarmore convincinglythan any politicalprocess. At approximatelythe same time as Things thatHappened waspublished,there appearedin Russia a new book, BorisSlutskii,Teper' Osventsim chasto snitsiamne (St Petersburg, I999), which contains three furtherexcerpts from the poet's war memoirs which are even more outspoken than those in Smith's compilation, stressing, amongst other things, the poet's strong sense of his Jewish identity. Important as the new materials undoubtedly are, their unavailabilityto nTings thatHappened does not diminishthe overallvalue of the present volume which depends not on sensation but on a carefullypainted overallportraitof a man and his age. Many of the poems that Smith has chosen to build his composite pictureof Slutskii'sexperiences were writtenin the 195os but only publishedfortyor so years later. One such was the verse tribute to his friend and patron Jl'ia Erenburg,which firstappearedin I99I: He didn'ttakea thawto be the spring, and fascinatedby the new, he didn't overlookthe old in it. Oh no! He didn'ttakea thaw forspring, and wasn'tscaredof scarecrows,not at all, but he knewwell how powerfulthey are (p. 2 I0). Apart from understated yet telling political statements, Slutskii's suppressed poems produce a pleasingly sceptical and dry-eyed view of the heroic events of the War, and a picture of the friendships and achievements as well as the miseries of literary life during and just after Stalin's reign, often tinged with Jewish irony and humour...